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Being A Foxy President Is Not An Easy Task

When you become the newly elected leader of the greatest nation ever to grace this sorry world, you are entrusted with many responsibilities that can’t be easily ignored. Some of responsibilities may seem trivial to you, but you should never ignore even the most basic duties…like being on time. Some people might laugh at punctuality as an awesome responsibility for a president, but think about it. A president is only a human being, not a superman, and he is burdened with many duties, so he can’t do all of them at once. But he has to make best of them by using time wisely.

It’s just like what the Bible says in Ephesians 5:16, “Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.” A president should use alloted time to each duty and attending an event wisely, after all, it does make an quite impression on ordinary people and elected representatives alike. Being on time demonstrates that he cares enough about them not to waste their precious time, and display some seriousness in going about his presidential duties. I am not saying President Barack Obama has to be on time all the time, after all, nobody is perfect, but one should not make it a habit to be late.

When it comes to following the clock, Obama closely resembles Bill Clinton, who was famously late to events when he was president. By contrast, Bush despised being late and punctual to a fault. He set the tone early in his presidency — he arrived at the Capitol five minutes early for his inauguration.

“To me, being tardy, it’s got to be one of two things,” said presidential historian Doug Wead, who advised both Bush and his father, George H.W. Bush. “Bad organization that can be corrected, or it’s arrogance. It sounds to me like this is arrogance.”

Mark Lindsay, a Democratic consultant and former senior White House adviser to Bill Clinton, disagreed, explaining that Clinton was late sometimes because he was making accommodations for logistics or average citizens.

How is being late an accommodation for ”average” citizens or an elected representative? If you are late for an important meeting, then that tells people who attended it that you don’t consider it important enough to be on time. Imagine a Pro-bowl player not showing up on time for team meetings, and watch what happens in the locker room. The teammates won’t be happy with him, and coaches can’t impart some valuable tips to that player simply because there’s not much time to do it. This leads to a small crack in team chemistry, perhaps only a minor one, but when you start adding up all those times, and you start to understand what an ugly picture it is for the team who needs this Pro-bowl player’s talents and leadership.

Guess what? President Obama is our Pro-bowl player, for better or worse, he is effectively our new and current leader of Free World. And he’s not showing up on time. He’s just acting like Bill Clinton. Mr. President, being a president isn’t like playing in sandbox, where nothing gets hurt. There are important decisions to be made, and if you can’t be bothered to be on time, then obviously it means you don’t consider us important enough. In the other words, we’re just pawns in your playboy presidency. This is pure arrogance at its worst.

I don’t like President Obama, but I want him to get serious on, you know, actually acting like a real president!

Allan Lichtman, a political history professor at American University, had a different explanation for Clinton’s tardiness.

“President Clinton was always late because he wasn’t very disciplined in general,” he said. “This was a man who marched to the beat of his own drummer, who liked to talk, liked intellectual discussions, had his finger in every pie.”

There are two kinds of presidents, Lichtman said: “Foxes and hedgehogs.”

“Foxes know a little about everything. They have their fingers in every pie. … Hedgehogs only know a few things and know it well and leave the details to others. Clinton was a classic fox. Bush was a classic hedgehog.”

Obviously, President Obama shares some similar traits with Bill Clinton, and being late is one of them. If both share this trait, it could only mean both are not disciplined at all. And not being disciplined means somebody HAVE TO do some duties for them. An undisciplined person means he’s not in control of himself, and to me, I don’t think either Obama or Clinton was ever in control of themselves. They had someone to guide them around, because being late means they miss out some important information and have to play catch-up. If President Obama cannot discipline himself being on time, then perhaps this is a symptom of not being experienced or ready enough to be the 44th President of the United States.

President Obama is indeed a fox. And it’s very difficult to tame a fox, actually, I don’t know if it could be tamed at all. And I’m afraid we’ve just left a fox to guard the henhouse.

And Obama? He appears to be a fox, too, Lichtman said.

It’s just so sad that 52% of voters choose Obama over McCain. We get to see what kind of a fox President Obama will turn out to be. In the world of post-partisanship, we can only have so many foxes running amok in Washington. Despite this, at least we can take some comfort in the fact that being a foxy president isn’t an easy task to accomplish. President Obama has the next four years to prove us wrong, but I don’t think so.